Shooting scare at campus

Thursday

Apr 24, 2014 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - Parents picking up their children from after-school programs feared the worst Wednesday when they arrived at John Marshall Elementary School to find police responding to a report of a person shot on campus.

Jason Anderson

STOCKTON - Parents picking up their children from after-school programs feared the worst Wednesday when they arrived at John Marshall Elementary School to find police responding to a report of a person shot on campus.

Authorities quickly determined that the victim, a 22-year-old man, drove to the school to seek help after being shot in a nearby neighborhood. Stockton Unified School District Police Chief Bryon Gustafson said no students, staff or faculty were involved in the shooting and that everyone on campus was safe, alleviating concerns of parents who feared the possibility of a schoolyard shooting.

"That was the first thing that came to my mind," said Maria Ente, whose son is a fourth-grader at the elementary school. "I thought, 'Oh, my God. Not another one.' I live right down the street, and I just thought something really bad happened, so I ran over here. I was concerned for all the little kids."

The shooting occurred about 2:45 p.m. at South Fresno Avenue and Diablo Creek Drive, about a half-mile from the elementary school. The victim told police he saw two men in a gold, late-1990s model Chevy Impala staring at him as he turned onto South Fresno Avenue from West Eighth Street.

As he passed the vehicle, the driver and a passenger opened fire with handguns, police said. The victim was struck once in the back and his car was struck eight times, officers said.

One of the gunmen was described as a heavyset Latino man with curly hair and a black shirt, police said. Nineteen evidence markers littered the intersection where the shooting occurred, 16 of them marking the locations of shell casings, investigators said.

"I heard 15 to 20 shots," said Jose Naranjo, 16, an Edison High School student who was home alone at the time. "I've never seen anything like that. It was terrifying."

Naranjo went outside to find that his home was one of three that had been struck by gunfire. Next door, a bullet smashed through a living room window and struck an interior wall, just above a staircase. Estrella Williams, 47, stood outside a corner house - a care home for developmentally disabled people - which was also struck by bullets.

"Five days a week, (the developmentally disabled residents) go to school from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.," Williams said. "They start rolling in here at 3 o'clock, so I'm glad they were not here when it happened."

The victim drove a black Volkswagen Jetta to the north side of the school and went into a classroom to seek help, said Officer Joe Silva, a spokesman for the Stockton Police Department. SUSD spokeswoman Dianne Barth said there were no students in the classroom at the time.

Medics arrived to find the man suffering from a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to the back, but he was alert and conscious when he was transported to a hospital, Silva said.

Classes at the elementary school had been dismissed about 2:10 p.m., but there were 120 to 130 children on campus participating in after-school programs, Barth said. The school was briefly placed on lockdown while emergency responders tended to the victim.

Contact reporter Jason Anderson at (209) 546-8279 or janderson@recordnet.com. Follow him at recordnet.com/crimeblog and on Twitter @Stockton911.